Corporate communication is the message issued by a corporate organization, body, or institute to its publics. "Publics" can be both internal (employees, stakeholders, i.e. share and stock holders) and external (agencies, channel partners, media, government, industry bodies and institutes, educational and general public).
An organization must communicate the same message to all its stakeholders, to transmit coherence, credibility and ethic. If any of these essentials is missing, the whole organization may fail. Corporate Communications help organizations explain their mission, combine its many visions and values into a cohesive message to stakeholders.
According to the book Essentials of Corporate Communication[1] by Cees van Riel and Charles Fombrun the term Corporate Communication can be defined as the set of activities involved in managing and orchestrating all internal and external communications aimed at creating favorable starting points with stakeholders on which the company depends. Corporate communication consists of the dissemination of information by a variety of specialists and generalists in an organization, with the common goal of enhancing the organization's ability to retain its license to operate.
As Jackson (1987)[2] remarks:
"Note that it is corporate communication — without a final "s". Tired of being called on to fix the company switchboard, recommend an answering machine or meet a computer salesman, I long ago adopted this form as being more accurate and left communications to the telecommunications specialists. It's a small point but another attempt to bring clarity out of confusion.
It is, however, still evident that Jackson's desire to abolish the final "s" has not been universally adopted.
The concept of corporate communication could be seen as an integrative communication structure linking stakeholders to the organization. A corporate communication structure is a system which enables organizations to strategically orchestrate all types of communication.
There are three principal clusters of task-planning and communication is an important part of the business and it based on activity within organizations. They are typically classified as management communications, marketing communications, and organizational communications.
Management communications are communications between management and its internal and external audiences. To support management communications, organizations rely heavily on specialists in marketing communications and organizational communications. Marketing communications get the bulk of the budgets in most organizations, and consist of product advertising, direct mail, personal selling, and sponsorship activities. They are supported by organizational communications from specialists in public relations, public affairs, investor relations, environmental communications, corporate advertising, and employee communications.
Corporate communication encompasses management communications, marketing communications, and organizational communications. Corporate communication implies a coherent approach to development of communications in organizations, so communication specialists can standardize communications by creating a common strategic framework.
Corporate communication is historical links to the field of public relations, which has been concerned with the voice and image of big business for nearly a century.[3] The “Fathers of Public Relations”, Ivy Ledbetter Lee and Edward L. Bernays addressed some issues that managers still face today in corporate communication. Issues in corporate communication are:
The responsibilities of corporate communication are:
A Conference Board Study of hundreds of the US’s largest firms showed that close to 80 percent have corporate communication functions that include media relations, speech writing, employee communication, corporate advertising, and community relations.[4]
A modern corporate communication function performs company wide, global activities such as corporate advertising, and the management of corporate identity and image and reputation, as well as communications issues targeted more narrowly to a particular constituency important to the company as a whole, such as employees, customers, investors, government, or the public. The public is often represented by self-appointed activist non-governmental organziations (NGOs) who identify themselves with a particular strategic issue. To address the concerns of these generic groups, most companies have created specialized departments responsible for communicating about and with these groups[5]:
A corporate brand is the internal perception of a company that unites a group of products or services for the public under a single name, a shared visual identity, and a common set of symbols. The process of corporate branding consists creating favorable associations and positive reputation with both internal and external stakeholders. The purpose of a corporate branding initiative is to generate a positive halo over the products and businesses of the company, imparting more favorable impressions of those products and businesses.
In more general terms, research suggests that corporate branding is an appropriate strategy for companies to implement when:
There are two approaches for Identity, respectively Corporate Identity and Organizational Identity.
Four types of identity can be distinguished (Balmer, 1997;[11] Balmer and Wilson, 1998 [12]):
Corporate responsibility (often referred to as corporate social responsibility), corporate citizenship, sustainability, and even conscious capitalism are some of the terms bandied about the news media and corporate marketing efforts as companies jockey to win the trust and loyalty of constituents. Corporate responsibility (CR) constitutes an organization’s respect for society’s interests, demonstrated by taking ownership of the effects its activities have on key constituencies including customers, employees, shareholders, communities, and the environment, in all parts of their operations. In short, CR prompts a corporation to look beyond its traditional bottom line, to the social implications of its business. (Argenti, 2009;[13])
Reputations are overall assessments of organizations by their stakeholders. They are aggregate perceptions by stakeholders of an organization's ability to fulfill their expectations, whether these stakeholders are interested in buying the company's products, working for the company, or investing in the company's shares.[14]
In 2000, the US-based Council of PR Firms identified seven programs developed by either media organizations or market research firms, used by companies to assess or benchmark their corporate reputations. Of these, only four are conducted regularly and have broad visibility:
Crisis communication is sometimes considered a sub-specialty of the public relations profession that is designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization facing a public challenge to its reputation. These challenges may come in the form of an investigation from a government agency, a criminal allegation, a media inquiry, a shareholders lawsuit, a violation of environmental regulations, or any of a number of other scenarios involving the legal, ethical, or financial standing of the entity. The crisis for organizations can be defined as follows[15]:
As the volume of communications grows, many companies create an employee relations (ER) function with dedicated staff to manage the numerous media through which senior managers can communicate among themseves and with the rest of the organization. Internal communications in the 21st century is more than the memos, publications, and broadcasts that comprise it; it’s about building a corporate culture on values that drive organizational excellence. ER specialists are generaaly expected to fulfill one or more of the follwoing four roles (Krone et al., 1987[16]):
The investor relations (IR) function is used by companies which publicly trade shares on a stock exchange. In such companies, the purpose of the IR specialist is to interface with current and potential financial stakeholders-namely retail investors, institutional investors, and financial analysts.
The role of investor relations is to fulfill three principal functions:
The role of the public relations specialist, in many ways, is to communicate with the general public in ways that serve the interests of the company. PR therefore consists of numerous specialty areas that convey information about the company to the public, including sponsorships, events, issues management and media relations.
Issues management A key role of the PR specialist is to make the company better known for traits and attributes that build the company’s perceived distinctiveness and competitiveness with the public. In recent years, PR specialists have become increasingly involved in helping companies manage strategic issues – public concerns about their activities that are frequently magnified by special interest groups and NGOs. The role of the PR specialist therefore also consists of issues management, namely the “set of organizational procedures, routines, personnel, and issues” (Dutton and Ottensmeyer, 1987[17]). A strategic issue is one that compels a company to deal with it because there is “ a conflict between two or more identifiable groups over procedural or substantive matters relating to the distribution of positions or resources” (Cobb and Elder, 1972[18]).
Media relations To build better relationships with the media, organizations must cultivate positive relations with influential members of the media. This task might be handled by employees within the company’s media relations department or handled by a public relations firm.
Company/spokesperson profiling These "public faces" are considered authorities in their respective sector/field and ensure the company/organization is in the limelight.
Recent research on the corporate communication function reports that corporate communication officers (CCOs) in Global Fortune 500 companies tend to have average tenures of about 4.5 years and that nearly one-half (48 percent) report to the Chief Executive Officer. CCOs say that approximately 42 percent of their job is strategic and 58 percent is tactical. Over the next year, they will be focusing more on social responsibility, social media and reputation. The research done by Weber Shandwick and Spencer Stuart found distinct differences between CCOs in Most Admired companies versus Contender companies.[19]
|
||||||||